This week in squirrels… From Sun Sep 13th to Sat Sep 19th

Summary

  • Week 2: Utah is Utahing
    • I am not getting out much because of the consecutive 08:00 chemo most of the week, and while it’s nowhere near the worst, it’s not playing around either.
    • I miss my friends, I miss being able to catch streams, I miss streaming, I miss my stuff… I also miss having internet that isn’t hot crap. The hotel’s internet is heavily rate limited in order to try and get you to buy a pricey daily upgrade.
  • Infinity calls
    • I am calling and talking to everybody this week: insurance, hospital, care team, all of it. Even my PCP and other care providers.
    • My phone is also ringing off the hook from scammers. For the first time in my life, I got a warning that my voicemail was 90% full… 380 voicemails, all from filtered calls, all scammers.
  • Lots of work
    • I am trying to get everything out before the big stuff happens. I was also told I’m returning to leading projects this week. This is a big milestone for me. I have been supporting others since the cancer took me out.
  • NixOS on a slow connection is heck.
    • I think I have mentioned this before, but all of my travel recently has reminded me of one of the bigger, less-spoken-about flaws of NixOS: the bandwidth requirements.
    • Even a minor change to the build tree can mean downloading many gigabytes of data. Running on unstable likely amplifies this, but I have had several days in a row where a switch takes over 45 minutes to download everything, and then the next day another 45 for the same packages because we tweaked the build script for pnpm or something.
  • Big self-hosted updates
    • Jellyfin 12.x dropped, and the new UI is awesome. I am not really feeling a lot of the optimizations yet, but I imagine I can finally add music back into it.
    • Navidrome got a big update with some big back-end changes and a new API to allow for Jellyfin clients.
    • Immich 3.2 technically was last week, but I held off on the update
    • Feishin also got itself a big update; they usually come along after Navidrome.
  • Re-theme
    • Ok, so I am trying not to play with bars, but I couldn’t resist still working on everything since I am remote and don’t have a lot of my other distractions.
    • GruvBox Hard Dark for terminal and RosePine Dawn for everything else have been my core styles for a very long time. I generally dislike many of the most popular color schemes because they are either very blue or look really neon the moment you use flux/nightlight.
    • I was looking at a Discord chat that had people showing off their setups, and I saw somebody share an amazing-looking minimal Everforest setup.
    • I gave it a try, and I am hooked on Everforest. It works amazingly under flux and uses green as its base color instead of the popular blue. It has officially tuned Hard/Medium/Soft contrasts. I can use its light and dark without any complaints either way.
    • It’s both contrasting enough for me but also not harsh with the soft greens. The dark does feel slightly hazier than gruvbox or another favorite backup ayu, but after 30 minutes I barely noticed. Thanks perception shifting! I know this is blasphemy but… I am even using a light-mode terminal with it.
    • This also brought me to learn about lutgen,, which is an incredibly cool tool for tinting art for wallpapers that fit into your themes even more. It took some fiddling, but now I have new sets of all my wallpapers that fit just a bit nicer.
  • Time for the CAR-T
    • It’s a scary bit. A lot of life-risking things can come up. Will it be nothing? Will it be touch and go? The day of went fine, but it was very exhausting for such a small procedure.
    • The day after CAR-T, I had a bad crash, a super bad crash out. Turns out it was ALL ANXIETY. I legit had a panic attack. They gave me some anxiety meds, and I slept for a day or so.
    • Honestly, I seem to be taking the CAR-T well. No issues. Passing all my cognitive tests with flying colors.
  • Mom’s own crash out
    • My mom has not enjoyed the trip with me. We have never particularly gotten along, but it’s worse being in proximity. She’s upset about everything: I’m too loud, I’m too excited, I’m not into what she’s into, we aren’t politically aligned, I don’t want to eat what she wants to eat. I wander off and don’t follow her in the grocery store. I drive my car; I spend too much time by myself; all of my music is horrible. The hotel doesn’t have all her channels, etc etc.
    • This also includes the housekeeping staff refreshing the provided bars of soap. That was the big crash out this week. Watching my mom hide the hotel soap from the housekeepers so they don’t take away the most-used bars is wild.
    • This is on top of her losing her mind being all cooped up without her husband, all her friends, and her grandkids. She’s so used to being surrounded by people who actively enjoy engaging with her constantly. Yanno, we both get homesick pretty quickly.
  • Returning to reading.
    • It’s so tempting to do nothing but be on the computer, since I am here, but I am picking back up my books.
    • I also brought some music gear, but it hasn’t come out yet.
  • My first hailstorm.
    • I had never experienced a hailstorm before. Unsurprisingly, getting hit in the face with hail stings a bit, but it wasn’t bad. I didn’t like the sound of it on my car at all either. With that hail came the wildest rainstorm I ever drove in my life, but SLC streets are all 40 mph, and my Outback handled it with aplomb.

Books

  • I Love Amy, Vol 3 ⭐️⭐️⭐️
    • A bit of a mess compared to previous volumes. The story jumps around far too much as it tries to exposition dump everybody’s backstory and secrets across four characters while still shuffling the plot along. The characters do all get some good movement, but getting there is a hard read
  • Koharu and Minato Happy Life with My Girlfriend Vol 2 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
    • Absolutely saccharine, with not too much drama going on. But the story was way more coherent than the first volume, and both the art and content are a light, fun read.
  • I Don’t Know Which Is Love, Vol 5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
    • I feel like the author’s “same face” was a little less bad. It is really fun to watch all the various interests actually interact with each other instead of solely fighting over the MC. The volume is still very horny but stays cheeky and fun instead of boobs everywhere. It’s a little interesting to me that this is going all-in on the most problematic choice.

Music

  • Chat Pile’s “Who Loves the Sun”
    • Chat Pile is one of these bands I wish I knew about before. I picked up their previous two LPs and two EPs too. Angry leftist political sludge metal? Fuck yeaaaaaaa.
  • Cyonthi
    • Who doesn’t want breakcore when you are trying to stay sane
  • Filter
    • I started listening to the new Stabbing Westward “Wither - ReWired” but honestly didn’t love it. It made me want to start listening to Filter again, so I have.
  • Rebecca Black’s “Age of the Exhibitionist”
    • This one isn’t sticking with me like her first one. I will have to give it more time.

Reads and Videos